While living in the City of Lights, Van Peebles wrote several novels before landing a $60,000 grant from the French Cinema Center to adapt one of them as a feature film. Shot as La Permission over the course of 36 days, Van Peebles' feature film debut was the French entry into the 1967 San Francisco Film Festival, for which it was retitled The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1967). The bittersweet tale of a spirited, short-lived interracial romance between a black American soldier and a white French girl, The Story of a Three-Day Pass was picked up for stateside distribution and opened doors for its director in Hollywood.
To hear Melvin Van Peebles tell the story, Hollywood was shamed by the fact that the French entry in an American Film Festival was the work of an expatriate Negro. With the doddering studio system desperate to put a black man in the director's chair, Van Peebles kept Hollywood waiting before he agreed to sign a contract paving the way for Gordon Parks to make The Learning Tree (1969) and Shaft (1971) and Ossie Davis to direct Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970). Van Peebles eventually hired on with Columbia Pictures, who offered him the script The Night the Sun Came Out on Happy Hollow Lane, adapted by New York writer Herman Raucher from his novel of the same name. (Raucher would strike it big a year or so later with his celebrated screenplay for the nostalgic hit Summer of '42.) Columbia wanted the project, about a crass white insurance salesman who wakes up black, as a vehicle for Jack Lemmon or rising star Alan Arkin. Van Peebles thought a black actor should play the role, given that the character is black-skinned for ninety percent of the film. Eventually Van Peebles got his way and was able to cast Godfrey Cambridge, an Obie-winning, Tony-nominated stage actor and topical comedian who had just made the leap from episodic TV to prominent roles in such feature films as The President's Analyst (1967), The Biggest Bundle of Them All (1968) and Cotton Comes to Harlem.
It's jarring to see Godfrey Cambridge capering in unconvincing whiteface during Watermelon Man's opening frames. With his clay-colored skin, carroty hairpiece and Cheshire Cat grin, Cambridge's Jeff Gerber resembles no one so much as Alfred E. Newman, which is oddly appropriate as Van Peebles had a sideline in Paris translating Mad magazine into French. Played for the broadest of laughs, Watermelon Man goes for an edgy, discomfiting level of hysteria that may be difficult to fully appreciate for anyone born post-All in the Family. The film's anger isn't surface-level but holds its breath just below and is palpable in a number of acidic exchanges, as when a pre-transformation Gerber kids his black bus driver (D'Urville Martin) that during slavery he would have had to drive from the back of the bus or when a cocoa-colored Gerber complains to the manufacturer of his sun lamp that he is "a little darker than is necessary." Chased down by an alarmist mob of white suburbanites while running for his morning bus (the assumption being that a black man can only run from something), Watermelon Man recalls the mobbed "baby killer" of Joseph Losey's M (1951) but taken end to end is closer kin as a nightmare fantasy to Kurt Neumann's sci-fi classic The Fly (1958). It's a coin toss as to which film has the more tragic conclusion.
Having spent, by his own calculation, "80% of the energy on Watermelon Man...fighting in the corridors of power," Melvin Van Peebles turned his back on an offered three-picture deal with Columbia. Taking $70,000 of his earnings and a $50,000 loan from comic/entrepreneur Bill Cosby, Van Peebles moved on to the leaner and infinitely meaner Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), which he shot guerilla style using an all black cast. A seminal title in the controversial canon of "blaxploitation," the film grossed $10 million, nearly equaling the take on Cotton Comes to Harlem and Shaft but a greater success relative to cost. But beyond the box office, Sweet Sweetback... had a greater value for blacks in its rejection of white custodianship, in having been made completely outside the Hollywood system, in being a film by African Americans for African Americans.
Sadly, Van Peebles was never able to repeat this level of success and influence. It remains one of the cruel ironies of his career that Van Peebles' contributions to black cinema are largely forgotten while black-themed films made by white directors (among them Barry Shear's Across 110th Street (1972), Jack Starrett's Slaughter [1972], Jack Hill's Coffy [1973] and Larry Cohen's Black Caesar [1973]) linger as pop culture touchstones. To this day, Van Peebles continues to publish, and to write and act both on his own and in partnership with his son, actor-director Mario Van Peebles. He has also been recognized by no less a figure than Spike Lee as "the Godfather of black films."
Producer: John B. Bennett
Director: Melvin Van Peebles
Screenplay: Herman Raucher
Cinematography: W. Wallace Kelley
Art Direction: Malcolm C. Bert, Sydney Z. Litwack
Music: Melvin Van Peebles
Film Editing: Carl Kress
Cast: Godfrey Cambridge (Jeff Gerber), Estelle Parsons (Althea Gerber), Howard Caine (Mr. Townsend), D'Urville Martin (Bus Driver), Mantan Moreland (counterman), Kay Kimberley (Erica), Kay E. Kuter (Dr. Wainwright), Scott Garrett (Burton Gerber), Erin Moran (Janice Gerber).
C-97m.
by Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
Melvin van Peebles interview by Andrew Rausch, Reflections on Blaxploitation: Actors and Directors Speak (The Scarecrow Press, 2009)
"Blood Money or Money and Bloods" by Melvin van Peebles, Black Genius: African American Solutions to African American Problems (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000)
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song: A Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto by Melvin Van Peebles
"Melvin Van Peebles: The Black Movie Director as Folk Hero," Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An interpretive History of blacks in American Films by Donald Bogle (Continuum International Publishing Group)
